The point of compressing is to fit more on the CD. Knoppix does this too. DSL just limits itself to 50MB as a line in the sand they will not cross. There have been others like Puppy and Flonix that crossed the size border to add even more of what they thought was useful. Flonix went commercial and Puppy has gone off in their own direction, but is still very similar to DSL. DSL has forced itself to chop out that which is not needed for a LiveCD, like apt and dpkg and replace standard gnu-utils with busybox and writing their own apps in lua, like the mixer applet, the myDSL interface and the control panel applet. Lua is a little like Perl, very small and very powerful.

If you wanted to build your own DSL that was not compressed, I'd imagine you would end up with something like 2x the size requirements, 100MB. I just remembered one other thing about DSL's small size, it allows you PLENTY of space on a full-sized custom build CD at 650MB to add all the extra apps that have been pkged to work with DSL. I've done that before and maxed out a 650MB disk. Games galore and you name it, but I still didn't have room for everything. I mostly did this to see what I could do and to test apps in the repository to see that they worked with new versions of DSL. I had to stop at some point when I got too busy.

-----Original Message----- From: Luke -Jr Sent: Wednesday, January 24, 2007 2:24 PM

On Wednesday 24 January 2007 14:01, Jared wrote:

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Eh... if DSL is so small, why does it need to be compressed to fit on a CD?

Because the CD fits in your wallet. It's a 50MB business-card CD.

Ah, makes sense. ;) But what would be cooler is a wallet-CD uncompressed that just boots to a NX terminal or recovery cmd prompt...

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions# How_can_I_have_a_VNC_server_start_automatically_at_boot.3F you can do something similar with the nxclient in the MyDSL repo.